This incident received much sensationalized and exaggerated press coverage in Germany where it was claimed that an attempted mutiny had occurred on the Emden, and which Raeder apparently took more seriously than he did the reports from his own officers.

In April 1932, when the Defence Minister General Wilhelm Groener decided to ban the SA as a threat to public order, Raeder strenuously objected to the ban, arguing that it was the Reichsbanner and the rest of the left-wing paramilitary groups that should be banned instead, and claimed right-wing paramilitary groups like the SA were essential to save Germany from Communism.

At the same time, Raeder worked to promote National Socialist ideology as opposed to the NSDAP in the Navy, ordering in September 1936 that all officers read a tract by Kriegsmarine Commander Siegfried Sorge called Der Marineoffizier about what it took to be a good officer., Sorge had claimed that one could not be a good naval officer without believing in National Socialist values.

Raeder later claimed when on trial for his life at Nuremberg that the Hossbach conference was a flight of fancy on Hitler's part that nobody took seriously, and he did not object because there was nothing to object to.

Raeder later claimed during his testimony at Nuremberg and in his memoirs to have been opposed to the denunciation of the A. G. N. A., which he claimed to have been kept in the dark about, but contemporary evidence from 1939, not the least Raeder's own role as the author of the Z Plan suggests otherwise.

In a speech in early January 1943, Raeder called World War II an ideological war, praised National Socialism for its " moral strength ", and claimed that only through National Socialist indoctrination could the war be won.

In his report to Hitler about Weserübung, Raeder claimed that the success of the operation was " undoubtedly largely " the work of the capital ships, and argued that the campaign in Norway had " amply confirmed the soundness " ( emphasis in the original ) of the construction policies of the 1930s that favoured capital ships over U-boats and carriers.

After the North Cape raid, Raeder blamed Marschall for the damage that Scnarnorst and Gneisenau had endured, claimed that Marschall had failed to understand his orders for Operation Juno properly, and sacked him.

The Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wanted Raeder and the other high officials of the " grocery ring " like Wilhelm Keitel, Hermann Göring and Hans Lammers who used their positions to ignore rationing when grocery shopping to be punished in order to let the German people know that the elite were suffering like everyone else, but Hitler claimed if the German people learned of the luxurious lifestyles of the elite in the middle of a war that the effect would be fatal to morale.

Raeder claimed in his 1957 memoirs Mein Leben that he had first learned that the regime in which he served so long was a criminal regime in March 1945 when he visited his old colleague, the former Defence Minister Otto Gessler in a hospital when he was recovering from the torture he received in a concentration camp.

Raeder claimed that he was not involved in a conspiracy to commit aggression because Hitler's statements in the Hossbach Memorandum of 1937 and again to senior officers including Raeder for plans for a war with Poland in May and August 1939 together with Raeder's own statements to Hitler about seizing Norway in October – November 1939 were all just mere talk that was not to be taken seriously.

Raeder claimed that he had been " very indignant " about his government's claim that Britain had sunk the Athenia, which led Maxwell Fyfe to remark that he had done nothing to express that " indignation ", just as he claimed to have been angry about the false charges of homosexuality against Werner von Fritsch, where he had also done nothing after Fritsch had been cleared.

When questioned by Maxwell Fyfe about the Libau massacres, Raeder claimed that he no idea about what had happened, and maintained that he would have stopped the massacres had he known.

Raeder claimed that Dönitz had made made all sorts of blunders and mistakes " resulting from his personal viewpoint, which were known to the officer corps, soon became apparent, to the detriment of the Navy ".

Finally, Raeder claimed that Dönitz was unqualified to become Commander-in-Chief of the Navy in 1943, and that Dönitz was only appointed to that position because Hitler preferred an unqualified " Hitler-boy " like Dönitz to qualified officers like himself.

Dönitz was savage in his relentless attacks against Raeder for his " policy of bloated surface vessels " and for not spending enough money on building U-boats in the 1930s, a policy that Dönitz claimed had cost him victory in the Battle of the Atlantic.

In a 1950 interview, Erika Raeder claimed that her septuagenarian husband was forced to do brutal " hard labour " in Spandau when Raeder's job in Spandau was to work in the prison library.

In another interview in 1951, Erika Raeder claimed that :" The treatment we Germans had to endure is worse than anything that happened to the Jews ".

Erika Raeder's campaign to free her husband was joined by German veterans, who bombarded the American, British and French governments with demands that Raeder, who they claimed was an innocent man wrongly convicted at Nuremberg, be freed.

" In an interview in November 1950, Admiral Hanson claimed that American and other United Nations commanders fighting in the Korean War would have been convicted of aggression if the same standards that were applied to Raeder applied to them.

* German leadership rejected Hartenstein's cease fire proposal, partly because Admiral Raeder did not think it wise to enter into a " deal " with the Allies, nothing was to interfere with Eisbär's surprise attack on Cape Town to strike at the supplies destined for the British and Soviets, and Hitler had directed that no word of Laconias sinking or the proposed Axis rescue be transmitted to the Allies, though subordinates ignored Hitler's orders and communicated messages to the Allies about the proposed rescue attempt.

Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations in the OKW, remarked, after Raeder said Kriegsmarine could not meet the operational requirements of the Army, " then a landing in England must be regarded as a sheer act of desperation ".

Admiral Raeder wanted a front stretching from Dover to Eastbourne, stressing that shipping between Cherbourg / Le Havre and Dorset would be exposed to attacks from the Navy based in Portsmouth and Plymouth.

Raeder's strong authoritarian tendencies came to the fore as soon he assumed command of the Reichsmarine in 1928 when he sent out a circular making clear that dissent would not be allowed while at the same time carrying out the " great seal hunt " of 1928-29 when Raeder forced most of the senior admirals into early retirement in order to promote men who were loyal to him.

Raeder was keenly aware that the Army was the senior service and that many in Germany took the view that because the great High Seas Fleet that Tirpitz had built had done almost nothing in World War I that it would be a waste of money and time to attempt to rebuilt Tirpitz's fleet.

Raeder took the view that the Navy should be " one family " with himself as the stern, but loving father figure, and the sailors as his " children ", from whom he expected unconditional obedience.

Raeder made it clear to his officers that he wanted them to be model Christian gentlemen, and that an officer who did not attend church on a regular basis would have little chance of promotion under his leadership.

In 1932, when the Navy's chief chaplain, Pastor Friedrich Ronneberger urged in his sermons that everyone pray for Hitler's victory in the presidential election that spring, Raeder sent him a letter remaining him that the Navy was supposed to be neutral on political issues, and asking him to keep his political opinions out of his sermons.

Such was the degree of Raeder's lobbying for bigger naval budgets that in early 1932, General Kurt von Schleicher, who viewed Raeder as a threat to the Army budget attempted to discredit Raeder by leaking a story in the press that Raeder was plotting to be defence minister.

Shortly afterwards, Raeder had his first private meeting with Hitler, and came away impressed, believing that if Hitler was no navalist, then he could be made into one just like his mentor Tirpitz had converted Wilhelm II to navalism.

Raeder accepted without complaint orders from the War Minister von Blomberg on 21 May 1935 that those who were of " non-Aryan descent " would not be permitted to join the Wehrmacht and all members of the Wehrmacht could only marry women of pure " Aryan descent " and another order from Blomberg in July 1935 saying no member of the Wehrmacht could buy from a store owned by " non-Aryans " under any conditions.

" Although Raeder was not anti-Semitic in the virulent National Socialist sense, he tolerated statements from his senior officers such as Admiral Schuster ( appointed by Raeder as the inspector of education and training ) who told new recruits in 1937 that they must be " racially and morally sound .".

In the same way, the sexually conservative Raeder who had a very strong dislike of homosexuality was one of the loudest who called for the resignation of the Army commander Werner von Fritsch when he learned that he had been accused of homosexuality, through Raeder qualified this that Fritsch should be reappointed Army commander if the charges were proven to be false.

On 4 January 1939 Raeder advised Hitler that given the Kriegsmarines status as third in regards to allocation of resources and spending behind the Army and the Air Force, the construction targets could not be met within the deadlines given.

Together with the war-time plans of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to start building capital ships with diesel engines in order to expand the range of German warships, Trotha influenced Raeder into thinking about deep operations into the Atlantic as a way of forcing the British to break up their fleet.

As a sign of his thinking for the future, all of the war plans that Raeder drew up from 1929 onwards for war in the future assumed that the Navy would go to war with regular capital ships instead of the " pocket battleships ".

In war plans that Raeder drew up in 1931-32 stated that the Reichsmarine would start a war with an surprise attack on the Polish naval base of Gdynia that was intended to destroy the Polish Navy and would then attack French ships in the North Sea before they could enter the Baltic.

Together with Göring, Raeder were the only ones present who did not object to Hitler's plans for aggression in Eastern Europe.

Owing to the fact that the great fleet envisioned in Plan Z existed only in blue-prints or had just began to be built, Raeder like Tirpitz before him in 1914 was forced to abandon his pre-war plans for a great naval battle in the North Sea, and instead embrace the guerre de course strategy that he had previously been opposed to.

Marschall was enraged that Raeder sent him out on the North Cape raid without air cover or a screening force of U-boats, without informing him of what were the orders given to U-boats operating in the area, and with no plans for resupply.

Since in early July 1940 it was believed by both Hitler and Raeder that Britain would soon surrender, the decision to resume the Z Plan, which meant spending hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks building warships that would take at least five years to finish, reflected plans for an ultimate war with the United States.

In September 1941, Raeder and the U-boat commander Karl Dönitz presented Hitler with plans for all-out U-boat offensive intended to destroy both the United States Navy and Merchant Marine.

Taylor drew attention to one thing that the memorandum can be used to prove ; “ Goering, Raeder and Neurath had sat by and approved of Hitler ’ s aggressive plans ,” but this does not necessarily mean that Hitler laid down his plans for the domination of Europe: there was no active decision to start a war made in the memorandum, just a decision about when war would be practical.